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Article snippet: A new president inexperienced in the intricacies of superpower politics meets his Russian rival for the first time. There are disputes over Crimea, nuclear weapons and completely different conceptions of an acceptable status quo as Washington and Moscow vie for global influence. The Americans arrive with an unclear agenda; the Russians have a very clear one. While it sounds like the coming encounter between President Trump and the current Russian leader, John F. Kennedy’s first face-to-face session with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union in June 1961. “You know, Mr. Kennedy, we voted for you,” Khrushchev said, as he recalled in his 1970 memoir. It is a line that, if one believes American intelligence reports, Mr. Putin could repeat, but probably will not. But it is the other lessons of that meeting in Vienna — which stretched over two days, three meals, a clumsy effort by Khrushchev to charm Jackie Kennedy and a tough one to threaten her husband — that might be useful to the Trump White House. It was one of the most remarkable leader-to-leader encounters of the Cold War, a story of caution about the dangers of walking into such a session without clear strategic goals. Minutes after the meeting was over, Kennedy told James Reston of The New York Times that it had been an incredibly rough session, for which he had been ill-prepared. “Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy said, according to later histories of the event. “He savaged me.” (Mr. Reston, perhaps... Link to the full article to read more